Sir David Lean CBE (25 March 1908 – 16 April 1991) is one of the greatest English film-makers of the 20th Century, a two-time Academy Award winner for films like The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia. He is especially associated with the Epic Movie for good reason. He pioneered location shooting, large-scale use of extras and visual extravagance common to the Hollywood genre but raised to a level of sophistication thanks to the deeper storytelling (resulting from Lean's collaboration with excellent screenwriters like Robert Bolt), richer characterization and the use of landscape as part of the story and character (best shown through a Widescreen Shot). A Lean epic is commonly associated with Scenery Porn, gorgeous landscape shots, incredible action set-pieces, technical brilliance and amazing performances.

Lean was born to a Quaker family in Surrey and from very early in his career, he made films with a Brownie camera. He was The Movie Buff as a young man who adored the films of King Vidor, William Wyler and John Ford. He eventually worked in British film studios and found his calling as an editor, including the famous George Bernard Shaw adaptions of Pygmalion (1937) and Major Barbara (1941) as well as films with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. He edited 49th Parallel and One of Our Aircraft Is Missing and Powell would consider Lean the best editor he worked with.

Lean's career stalled temporarily in the '50s. He made several largely-forgotten vehicles starring his wife, actress Ann Todd, along with a well-received but unsuccessful adaptation of Hobson's Choice staring Charles Laughton. His comeback came with Summertime starring Katharine Hepburn, a transitional film between his small-scale melodramas and later epics (it was filmed on location in Venice).

His first Epic Movie is The Bridge on the River Kwai for which he won an Oscar for Best Director, and then won a second Oscar for Lawrence of Arabia. Both movies were produced by Sam Spiegel and featured several of the same actors, including the ubiquitous Alec Guinness. They were box office hits and received generally positive reviews, becoming recognized as the high points of their genre.

His production pace slowed to a halt after that and critics generally found that his later films lacked the spirit of these films, despite the fact that Doctor Zhivago was a box-office success. This was also a time where the Epic Movie went out of fashion. The scathing reviews accorded to Ryan's Daughter reportedly discouraged Lean from making films for over a decade, though in reality he spent the '70s working on several failed projects, notably a remake of Mutiny on the Bounty (which eventually mutated into The Bounty, a much smaller-scale project helmed by a different director).

TV Tropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy